April through June 2016

“Human society is not a deterministic system but a collective learning process”.Victor Ferkiss

I HOPE YOU HAD A HAPPY WORLD GIRAFFE DAY ON JUNE 21.REMEMBER JULY 15 IS NATIONAL BE A DORK DAY.

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

A. ANDERSON VALLEY:

My route of choice from Highway 101 to Mendocino, Route 128, passes through Anderson Valley. I have seen many wonderful landscapes during my travels around the world. Anderson Valley is one of my favorites. It is more restful than exciting, more welcoming than beautiful. Years ago, when I had much more money than I have now, I considered buying a place here for my retirement. Instead, I found many other ways to throw away my money.

Do I regret it? No, that would change my experiences and memories. Without them, I would not be who I am but someone else. The loss of one’s past is a form of death.

Passing over the oak-forested hills west of Cloverdale, Route 128, enters a long valley with a few tiny towns, golden hills, orchards and vineyards speckled along it for about forty miles before burrowing through dark redwood groves and finally opening on to the coast at the mouth of the Navarro River.

In the center of the valley sits the town of Booneville, noted primarily for its residents having created a made-up language, like Esperanto, called Boont. Alas, like many indigenous languages under pressure from wealthier immigrants, (the wine revolution brought in a hoard of English speakers who refused to learn Boont) only a few old-timers are left who still remember the language.

This weekend Booneville hosted the Sierra-Nevada Music Festival, featuring an odd amalgam of folk music and reggae bands. The tickets, at almost $100 each, were too expensive for me so I spent a few minutes observing the crowd of concert goers. It was interesting how certain fashion styles persevere a long after their era has passed. Tie dye clothing and granny dresses predominated even among the young. There was even a glassy-eyed young man, stoned beyond redemption and covered head to toe in tie-dyed garments, walking down the middle of the street with a goat on a rope trudging along behind him.Orchards

Golden Fields and Hills

VineyardsThe Redwood Forest.

The Ocean and the Navarro River.

B. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN MENDOCINO:

My first morning in Mendocino, I had coffee with Maryann and George on their new deck.
Later that day, we attended the Comptche Voluntary Fire Department’s Father’s Day Chicken BBQ. To call Comptche a small one-store town in the woods would risk prompting visions of grandeur among the residents.

Here are Maryann and George enjoying their barbecue chicken and local beer.

Barbecuing the chickens.
There are places in the world where it appears time has stopped. In coastal Mendocino ,it seems to have gotten stuck in about In 1969. In the photograph below, the same ladies who I am sure danced on the local beaches during the height of the counter-culture dance to the music of the local ragtime jazz and be-bop rock bands that performed at the event. A strong whiff of smoldering cannabis mingled with the pungent fumes from the barbecue.
Then I returned home to the Golden Hills where I spent my days in bed bemoaning my inability to think of any other appropriate way but swimming (which you recall was especially difficult and embarrassing trailing my catheter and urine bag behind) during the recent blistering heat wave. The temperature reached 104 to 106 degrees ( 40-41 degrees Celsius for those that figure these things that way) or more here in the Golden Hills beside the Great Valley. So I spent my time thinking great thoughts, like why 0 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale is where it is, sort of hanging out there on nothing except that you are pretty damn cold, unlike the Celsius or Kelvin scale where 0 is set at the freezing point of water or absolute zero. Well, for your information, 0 degrees on the temperature scale was based upon Mr. Fahrenheit’s (for whom the scale was named) measurement of when a solution of one-half water and one-half salt freezes. I have no idea why he thought that was so important.

So, now you know why and I’ll bet a thimble full of my bellybutton lint you’ve pondered that way more often than you’ve pondered why do fools fall in love. The reason one would not think about Why Do Fools Fall In Love is that it was a song sung by that great 13-year-old rock sensation Frankie Lymon in 1956 and is probably remembered only by people my age.

Anyway, I remember attending a concert at the Apollo Theater in Brooklyn headlined by Frankie and his group The Teenagers. After the show, while Frankie was leaving the theater, he was met by a group of toughs who asked him the age old question, “ You think you’re so great, don’t you?” To which Frankie unwisely responded, ‘Yes I do,” and for which he was soundly trashed while his home boys the Teenagers ran away. Frankie’s career never recovered.

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

FREE SPEECH: if money is free speech, what is it saying?

The United States Supreme Court declared money spent to influence opinion protected under the Constitution’s First Amendments right of free speech. This released a lot of financial free speech into the political process. Much of that financial free speech has been expressed in secret. Many of those using financial free speech have demanded this secrecy. My question is, how can secret communications be considered free speech? What right is being protected here? One’s free speech right is the right of individuals to express themselves in the marketplace of ideas. Certainly, it is not to shield someone from the free speech right of others to disagree?

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

During my return from Mendocino, I stopped at Booneville’s bakery and coffee shop for a breakfast. I ordered a coffee and a scone. As I sat down at a table by the window, I noticed a copy of the local newspaper that someone had left behind. I picked it up started reading as I ate my breakfast.

The newspaper’s masthead identified it as the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Its motto Fanning the Flames of Discontent sounded to me more like a call to scratch an itch than to a revolution. The paper also claimed that it is the Last Newspaper in California. I had no idea what that means.

On the front page, there appeared a lengthy article entitled, The Courtroom As Porn Parlor. I surmised it would prove diverting and began to read. It reported on a trial recently concluded in Ukiah, the Mendocino County seat.

It seems that a 15-year-old girl from the coastal hamlet of Point Arena was, as has been common with teenagers forever, unhappy with the behavioral restrictions imposed on her by her mother, a single mother, who worked nights and whose husband, the girl’s father, lived in another state. The mom, in the running for mother of the year, responded to her daughter’s complaints by threatening her wayward daughter with being sent to live with her father, “And all his rules.”

The daughter, as teenagers will, sought solace elsewhere. In this case, on the internet, and in social media, especially rap sites and chat rooms. Eventually, and as expected, her pleas and complaints elicited a sympathetic response from a seeming sympathetic 25-year-old young man, Thessalonian Love. Rap Star Love as he came to be known in the article, resided at the time in the less than picturesque city of San Bernardino. One of Rap Stars earliest and perhaps most effective messages intended, I assume, to soothe emotional turmoil experienced by the troubled young lady from Point Arena declared:

“Yeah, I’m a guy, so show me them titties, bitch, and send me a ass shot!”

Responding eagerly to such endearments our ingenue and Thessalonian eventually agreed that he would travel to Mendocino, take her away from her drab existence in Point Arena and introduce her to the excitement of life in downtown San Bernardino.

Somehow, Mom got wind of this and when Love the Lothario presented himself at the girl’s school he was met not by the object of his affections but by the Sheriff who promptly arrested him on various charges of attempting to corrupt a minor and human trafficking.

The trial of Thessalonian Love aka Rap Star Love commenced with his lawyer’s opening statement to the jury that began:

“I don’t think 15-year-old girls still call it a pee-pee anymore,”

and continued;

“As for oral copulation, we’ve had President Clinton discussing it on TV long before this little girl was even born. And if any of you have listened to rap music, like most 15-year-olds have, you know it’s not unusual, or foreign and, frankly, these girls not only call their vagina a pussy, they refer to themselves — their gender collectively, despite the progressive achievements of the feminist movement — by the same terminology.”

And further on;

“We don’t know what this girl and her friends had to say about this ‘rap star’ coming to see her, but we can imagine they were pretty excited.”

Indeed.

The trial lasted ten days mostly made up of reading into the record or listening to the communications between the young lovers. I would like to imagine the jurors hearing the rap exchanges saw the young lovers as modern versions of Romeo and Juliet’s, but I doubt it.

However, as fascinating and entertaining as this may have been, it was not the most interesting thing that happened during the trial. No, not by a long shot.

The defendant took the stand. Unusual though it may have been, it, in itself, was not particularly interesting. What was, was that after a day on the stand attempting to explain himself, Thessalonian, began to lose hope, so after court was closed for the day, as he was being returned to the jail by the bailiff, Rap Star Love escaped.

The entire police force of Ukiah, including its four-person SWAT team and its K-9 Corps, was called out to search for him. They searched for him all night to no avail. This was odd because as cities go Ukiah is distinctly modest. In fact, even as towns go, Ukiah would still not shed its modesty.

The next morning a bailiff on the way to the court spotted our Thessalonian standing motionless in front of the town’s Walgreen’s, took him into custody and after feeding him breakfast promptly returned him to the courtroom to resume his testimony — which the Rap Star did. Except that, not having slept all night, he would periodically nod off during questioning.

Later during the trial, after Love complained to his attorney bitterly and loudly (out of the hearing of the Jury of course) that he was not receiving the quality of defense for which he was not paying, his attorney was overheard responding:

“You haven’t listened to a single thing I’ve said, and now you are in so deep there’s hardly anything I can do to save you from even the weakest charges they have against you. So, please be quiet for a minute, and let me think how best to salvage this mess.”

Thessalonian Love was quickly convicted by the jury on all counts and now awaits trial for escaping while in custody before sentencing.

All I could think of as I finished reading the article was, “Who knew things like this happened among Mendocino’s rolling hill and vineyards.”

DAILY FACTOID:

‘Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian Islands as early as 45,000 years ago.’Harari, Yuval Noah.Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 48). HarperCollins.

NOTE: This is 35,000 years before settled agricultural villages first appeared in the Middle-east.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Makers and Takers:

“What happens when you give a bunch of financiers easy money and zero interest rates is that they go out and try to make more money. That’s what they are wired to do,” says Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets for Morgan Stanley Investment Management and chief of macroeconomics for the bank. (He is just one of many experts who worry about the market-distorting effects of the Fed’s unprecedented program of asset buying and low-interest rates, which reached an apex in the wake of the 2008 crisis.) “Easy money monetary policy is the best reward in the world for Wall Street. After all, it’s mainly the rich who benefit from a rising stock market.”

Foroohar, Rana.Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. The Crown Publishing Group.B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

The Tragedy of Progressivism

“The tragic truth, however, is that the young as they age become conservatives, ethnic groups as they move into the middle class do so also. The gay community is now free to vote Republican without shame while the black community is prevented from voting even if they are Republican. And worse of all, the seven and eight-year-olds of our nation seem to have been indoctrinated in many of our schools to hate others as well as to despise science.”

“We progressives can slap ourselves on the back all we want, but as usual we have failed to grasp the grim realities of politics which is that it is an eternal war of attrition and the opposition is better equipped and trained while all too often all we have is our optimism to sustain us as the barricades are overrun while we wait for popular support that never comes.”

C. Today’s Poem:

From Childhood’s Hour

From childhood’s hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw; I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow; I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone;And all I loved, I loved alone.Then – in my childhood, in the dawnOf a most stormy life — was drawnFrom every depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that round me rolledIn its autumn tint of gold,From the lightning in the skyAs it passed me flying by,From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Heaven was blue)Of a demon in my view

E.A. Poe

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“I confess to an uneasy Physiocratic suspicion… that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity,”

“I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this ‘paper economy,’ not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges. For this reason, perhaps, high technology has so far yielded disappointing results in economy-wide productivity”.James Tobin, a former member of Kennedy’s Council of Economic advisors 1984

“When we were young with our peers about us, we dreamed and hoped for that which we had not yet experienced. Now in our old age, we dream and hope for one last chance at that which we will soon no longer have. Symmetry is a beautiful thing.”Baba Giufa

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN EL DORADO HILLS:

On Saturday, Dick suggested a drive through an area of the foothills I had not visited before. I welcomed the diversion because I had become desperately bored spending my days in the Golden Hills without even HRM’s antics to divert me. Also, spending hours alone allowed me the time to pathologically dwell on my health problems, every twinge a creeping threat every small pain a message of more to come.

We set off down Latrobe Road. Latrobe, as the main rail head 150 years ago, used to be the center of things in the area until new roads and rail lines bypassed it. Now all that remains is a few stores and a gas station.

I always liked this drive. As I watched the lonesome beauty of the oak-studded foothills pass by, I remembered long ago stopping by the side of a road like this, sneaking through the fence and climbing to the top of some gold carpeted hill. We lay in the shade of an oak tree drinking wine, eating some bread and cheese and smoking a joint. Later, beneath a cloudless sky, we made love. I was not very good at it. Not the drinking of the wine or eating the cheese, I was always good at those. Over the years, I learned the importance of pleasing your partner. It doesn’t just happen because you are in love or whatever. It no longer matters now, alas.

We turned east further into the foothills of Amador County and passed through some tiny hamlets I had never seen before.
Small wineries began to appear here and there some with elegant restaurants attached.

The wine region did not consist of large valleys filled with vineyards like in Napa, or the Dordogne or the rolling hills of Tuscany, but looked more like the vineyards of the Apennines — the crossing of a pine covered ridge into a tiny valley with a few vineyards then over the next ridge to another valley and more vineyards.

Eventually, we arrived our destination, the town of El Dorado and a one-time biker bar now tourist attraction for aging ex-bikers named Poor Red’s. Poor Red’s was originally built as a weigh station for Wells Fargo. It was called Kelly’s Bar from 1927 until around 1945. A guy named “Poor Red” won the bar in a game of dice, and he and his wife “Rich Opal” took it over soon after. They ran it for many years until recently when Poor Red and Rich Opal were convicted of tax evasion. They now are serving time in prison and a new owner runs the place. The Gold Cadillac cocktail was invented here and the place is reputed to be the largest purveyor of the Italian liquor Galliano in the world — not much of a claim to fame but good enough for a tiny town in the foothills. After downing their signature drink and eating a not too bad pulled pork sandwich, we returned home.
During the past few days, something occurred interesting enough that it prompted me to want to record it here. I decided to first spend a few days thinking over how I would write about it. Alas, I then forgot what it was that got me so excited. So, I decided to go to the movies instead.

The first movie I saw was Neighbors. I thought it was just meh. Two days later I went to see Nice Guys and liked it a lot. It was good to see a movie with clever patter to go along with an enjoyably unbelievable plot. A lot of people died. That was ok since most of them were bad guys and it was a comedy after all. I liked Russell Crowe as a fat PI — there was something Wellsian (Orson not H. G. ) about him. i then watched “my Cousin Vinny” on television for the umpteenth time and fell in love with Marisa Tomei once more.

After spending several days watching movies, staring at my computer screen and worrying about the health of my kidneys, I decided it was time for me to get away for a few days, so I left for Mendocino.

B. NONNA TERESA MAKES A BREAK FOR FREEDOM:

Recently I got news that my 98 or 99-year-old mother (my sister and I disagree about her actual age and my mom refuses to tell us) fell and injured her head while trying to break out of the nursing home at which she resides. She was taken to the hospital where she had two stitches inserted in her forehead. She returned to her bed in the nursing home not too much the worse for wear.

A couple of years ago I read a novel entitled “The One-Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Ran Away.” It told the story about a 100 year-old-man who ran away from his nursing home as they were preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday. He fell in with a group of criminals, grifters, and a sympathetic cop, made a lot of money and ended up living in Indonesia or someplace like that with his 70-year-old Thai girlfriend.

I always suspected that should my mom ever successfully break out of confinement, she would probably immediately organize a criminal gang of her own made up old ladies specializing in shoplifting and random muggings. She would then take her ill-gotten gains and settle down with her boyfriend in someplace like Colma in an apartment above a restaurant named “Nona Teresa’s Eggplant and Ditalini House.”

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

The senseless tragedy in Orlando Florida saddens me — people slaughtered only because of whom they chose to love. Once again in America, an angry young man armed with a gun murdered a bunch of people he did not know because he did not like or approve of them for some reason or other. Shame on us.

What is worse, I am neither shocked nor horrified. I fear I (and perhaps many of us) am becoming inured to this senseless mayhem. Mass murder with guns is to be expected in today’s America. It has become as constant as the tides. Yet, we do nothing. Shame on us.

We are urged by those who profit from the nation’s sorrow, to pick up guns to defend ourselves in order to be able to kill those we do not like and fear before they do so to us. Alas, in all likelihood, this will all end only when the last of us kills the last of them and they pry our guns from both of our cold dead hands. Shame on us.

We live in a reign of terror where we never know if or when some young man with hate in his heart and a gun will turn that gun on us or on our children. Shame on us.

And yet, our government that under the Constitution is charged with ensuring “domestic tranquility” does nothing while many of our elected representatives tell us that this same Constitution requires this reign of terror in order to preserve our freedom and liberty. Shame on us.

I am sure we all have noticed that rarely does an angry young woman pick up a gun and slaughter a bunch of innocent people solely because she does not like something about what they believe or who they choose to love. Perhaps we are approaching gun control all wrong. Of the almost 1000 mass shootings in America since Sandy Hook all, every single one, has been carried out by a man (one San Bernardino, he had a female accomplice). Maybe only women should be allowed to possess and carry guns. Not only might this eliminate these horrid mass killings, but reduce the incidence of rape and domestic violence as well

DAILY FACTOID:

“Since 1945, no independent country recognized by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map.”Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 370). HarperCollins

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Quigley on Top:

“By now it is clear to most thinking people that every decision we make on major public problems simply makes matters worse.”Carroll Quigley in his review of Ferkiss “In Search for a Solution to the World Crisis”,’1974.

B. Hierarchy of American belief in equality.

“Despite its proclamation of the equality of all men, the imagined order established by the Americans in 1776 also established a hierarchy. It created a hierarchy between men, who benefited from it, and women, whom it left disempowered. It created a hierarchy between whites, who enjoyed liberty, and blacks and American Indians, who were considered humans of a lesser type and therefore did not share in the equal rights of men. Many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. They did not release their slaves upon signing the Declaration, nor did they consider themselves hypocrites. In their view, the rights of men had little to do with Negroes.”

“The American order also consecrated the hierarchy between rich and poor. Most Americans at that time had little problem with the inequality caused by wealthy parents passing their money and businesses on to their children. In their view, equality meant simply that the same laws applied to rich and poor. It had nothing to do with unemployment benefits, integrated education or health insurance. Liberty, too, carried very different connotations than it does today. In 1776, it did not mean that the disempowered (certainly not blacks or Indians or, God forbid, women) could gain and exercise power. It meant simply that the state could not, except in unusual circumstances, confiscate a citizen’s private property or tell him what to do with it.

The American order thereby upheld the hierarchy of wealth, which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed as representing the immutable laws of nature. Nature, it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalizing indolence. All the above-mentioned distinctions — between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor — are rooted in fictions.

Yet, it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For instance, many people who have viewed the hierarchy of free persons and slaves as natural and correct have argued that slavery is not a human invention. Hammurabi saw it as ordained by the gods. Aristotle argued that slaves have a ‘slavish nature’ whereas free people have a ‘free nature’. Their status in society is merely a reflection of their innate nature.

Ask white supremacists about the racial hierarchy, and you are in for a pseudoscientific lecture concerning the biological differences between the races. You are likely to be told that there is something in Caucasian blood or genes that makes whites naturally more intelligent, moral and hardworking. Ask a diehard capitalist about the hierarchy of wealth, and you are likely to hear that it is the inevitable outcome of objective differences in abilities. The rich have more money, in this view, because they are more capable and diligent. No one should be bothered, then, if the wealthy get better health care, better education and better nutrition. The rich richly deserve every perk they enjoy.Harari, Yuval Noah . Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 134). HarperCollins.

C. TrenzPruca’s Observations:

The two great lies:

The first is, ‘if you work harder, you will have a better life” — For some perhaps but probably not you. For society as a whole. however, every time we passed the threshold where working longer and harder, such as during the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, the health, happiness and yes even wealth of the mass of people declined. But, some would point out, it allowed us to produce and accommodate far more of us. A questionable benefit if there ever was one.

The second lie is,“If we work harder, our children will have a better life.” Again yes for some, but, historically, for most the benefits were short-lived and eventually many of the children lived worse lives.

So what does this tell us? Work less, spend more time with your families and friends, live frugally replacing things with experiences, have fewer children with more adults caring for and loving them.

D. Today’s Poem:

“One day I wrote her name upon the strand
But came the waves and washed it away
Again I write it with a second hand
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.”Edmund Spenser

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“The law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.”Aaron Burr

A LITTLE SOMETHING FROM JOE HILL:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
To tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how about something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
That’s a lie

And the starvation army they play
They sing and they clap and they pray
‘ Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum:

You’re gonna eat, bye and bye, poor boy
In that glorious land above the sky, way up high
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
Dirty lie

Holy Rollers and jumpers come out
They holler, they jump, Lord, they shout
Give your money to Jesus they say
He will cure all troubles today

And you will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky, way up high
Work and pray, boy, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die

Workingmen of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When this world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:

Well, you will eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, it’ll do you good
You will eat in the sweet bye and bye

Yes you’ll eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky, way up high
Work and pray, and live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
That’s a lie….Joe Hill, 1910

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

Hot weather has struck the Golden Hills this week. The green grass has begun to show off its flaxen locks. The trees seem to bend beneath the weight of the sullen sun.

The Indomitable Oak Haiku

Of all the trees here,
the indomitable oak
Is my favorite.

A few weeks ago at my pre-travel medical checkup, they found urine in my kidneys and so I now carry around a catheter and bag. It is uncomfortable in the heat but, thankfully, will be removed well before I depart.

As far as my summer travels are concerned, it appears that instead of visiting Sicily after my sojourn through Milan, Sacile, Rome, and Sabina, I will be spending a week or so in Copenhagen and Malmo Sweden before departing for Thailand. The entire trip to Europe seems a bit too hectic for my tastes.

HRM, Dick and I spend our evenings agonizing over the Warriors’ playoff games. After the game, Dick and I would watch episodes of the Alec Gluiness’, Smiley Series. It really is time for me to begin traveling again and get a life .

The temperature has soared to over 100 degrees now for several days — close to boiling the piss in my urine bag. I had not checked the temperature at the beginning of the heat wave. Thinking it was only about 80 degrees, I persuaded myself that I was suffering heat flashes and exhaustion prior to my imminent demise. It was a relief discovering that I was expiring from simple heat stroke instead of some disgusting malady buried deep within my body.

One day, I went to a bar in Town Center named “The Relish Bar.” It specializes in serving hotdogs and hamburgers along with its drinks. I sat at the bar instead of one of the tables and ordered a hotdog with mustard and relish and a craft beer they had on tap. Next to me sat a woman with long straight brown hair. She was young, probably in her early twenties. In front of he was a half eaten hotdog smothered in ketchup, relish and sauerkraut and a whiskey of some sort on the rocks. I am highly prejudiced against people who put ketchup on their hotdogs so I decided to ignore her.

My order arrived and as I lifted my hotdog to my mouth I heard a sob. I glanced at the woman and noticed she seemed to be crying. “Mixing sauerkraut with ketchup will do that to you,” I thought. Nevertheless, I turned toward her and asked, “Is something wrong miss?” She turned towards me, a few strands of hair falling in front of her face, eyes fear wide with tears and said, “I don’t want to have to move to Canada.”

The catheter did not remedy the problem. So, I now have to submit to a series of tests and examinations. As a result, I had to cancel my trip to Italy and Sweden. I am disappointed to miss visiting friends and family in Italy and my trip to Sweden and Denmark. On the other hand, I was quite happy to avoid traveling with SWAC. So I hugged HRM and bid them both goodbye and left for Mendocino and the film festival.

Sadness at leaving
The ones who brighten our days
Makes journeys longer.

B. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN MENDOCINO:

Equipped with a new more comfortable urine bag, I hit the road to Mendocino stopping for a few hours in Petaluma to visit with Neal Fishman and his wife Maxine. Both Maxine and Neal worked with me at the Coastal Conservancy. He became the highly effective legislative liaison for the Conservancy.

We often forget that the real heroes omf a movement or an organization are those who labor at moving them ahead at critical points. Following my agreement with the Speaker to place 300 million in the first of a series of bond acts, Neal was instrumental in securing an additional billion dollars more in several park and open space bond acts that enabled the Conservancy to save much of the open space and develop many of the restoration projects that have preserved and enhanced coastal resources for all of us. His intelligence, openness, and understanding of legislators concerns helped make the Conservancy trusted on both sides of the political divide.

After leaving them, I drove on to my sister’s house, dropped off my things and walked to the theater to see the first film, “Jaco” about the great and tragic bass guitarist Jaco Pistorius. The next day I saw a film entitled “Trash Dance,” a documentary about dancing garbage men and women exposing their equipment. Both movies were entertaining despite the annoying tendency of most documentaries to interrupt the story line with interminable interviews.

Later, we attended a birthday party at the house of the Llama people (they breed llamas) next door to my sister where we ate magnificent paella made by the paella lady.
Llamas always remind me of the Ogden Nash Poem:

The Lama
The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.*— Ogden Nash

Two days later, I left for San Francisco and my mom’s birthday party. My sister and I disagree about her age. She maintains mom was born in 1918 and I believe it was 1917. In either case Happy Birthday mom.

Birthdays for the old
Like flowers in the springtime
Vibrant but too brief.

Then back to the Golden Hills and my medical tests.
* to which Nash appended the footnote,
“The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.”

This post examines the historical size of interest payments on the Federal Debt and their impact on the Government’s ability to manage its budget. I hope it is easy to understand and possibly corrects some of the hysteria and misstatements on all sides about the Country’s ability to service its debt and its impact on governmental programs and national security.

Perhaps the most significant concept to keep in mind is how the interest on this debt relates to income. One of the easiest ways to understand this is to think about it in reference to a person’s household debt. Basically, it is not how much debt you have but whether your income is sufficient to meet the periodic payments to pay off your debt and allow you to retain enough money live a good and decent life and you expect that income not to change dramatically for the worse all of a sudden.

Now, some recent history:

1. Interest payments on the Federal Debt as a percentage of total federal outlays:

1950 (About end of Truman Administration) interest payment on Federal Debt amounted to 11.4 percent of all Federal Government spending.

By 1960 at the end of Eisenhower’s reign it had dropped to 8.5 percent.

1970, despite costs of the Vietnam War during this decade (through the Kennedy, Johnson, and half of Nixon’s administration), it had decreased to 7.9 percent .

By 1980, when Reagan assumed office, the ratio of interest payments to debt had increased to 10.6 percent largely because the inflation crisis of the 1970s increased borrowing costs.

Despite the end of the inflation crisis, by 1985, about half way through the Reagan administration, it had ballooned to 16.2 percent of Federal outlays where it remained until Clinton took office.

In 2000, when Clinton left office, it had fallen to 13 percent.

By 2014, it had further decreased to 7.4 percent where it has more or less hovered since.

So, today the ratio of interest payments on the Federal Debt to total federal outlays is among lowest it has been since 1950 (except for the early years of the Bush II administration as they used up the Clinton budget surplus).2. Interest Rates as a percentage of Gross National Product (GNP)

Perhaps more significant is the ratio of interest payments to GNP.

Interest payments on the Federal Debt as a percentage of GNP stood at 1.7 percent in 1950 and held relatively steady until 1980 when Reagan assumed the presidency. In 5 years it ballooned to 3.6 percent. Beginning with the Clinton Administration, It has steadily fallen until reaching 1.4 percent just before the Great Recession after which it grew to 1.8 percent by 2015. In great part, the recent growth was held in check by historically low-interest rates.

To conclude, it appears the ability of the Federal Government to pay our debts remains more or less equivalent to its ability to pay its debts at any time in the last 65 years or so and substantially better than during the Reagan years. So, the sky is not falling.

If there is something to be worried about, it is the explosive growth of private debt especially household debt. Government debt has not grown much over the years and when it has it has usually been to bail out overextended private Financial and Corporate interests of to fund a war.

So what about the future?

There are estimates that, if we do nothing, by 2020 Federal Debt interest payments as a percentage of total Federal outlays will rise to 12.4 percent and to 2.7 percent of GNP. High but still lower than during the Reagan years when it was “Morning in America.”

Nevertheless, perhaps, something should be done to moderate that potential rise. Cutting Federal Spending seems unlikely. As the following chart indicates, Defense spending, Medicare and Social Security seem to make up an outsized portion of Federal spending. Cutting Food Stamps may please some people and assist others in their re-election but they have no significant effect on either the deficit or the debt. Democrats will riot in the streets to prevent tampering with Medicare and Social Security while Republicans, the Military Industrial Complex and a few Democrats will fight to the death to prevent the cutting of a favored military system.

So what to do?

Well, modestly raising taxes on non-productive income and wealth such as capital gains could probably do wonders.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

I regret that in my last T&T I did not notify everyone that several years back, I had declared May 8 PUN DAY. A quick check of the internet turned up May 15 as Pun Day based on an algorithm that measured how many times Pun Day was mentioned on social media. In the UK, it falls on February 8. Other days also have been proposed. Austin Texas held an O’Henry Pun-Off World Championship on May 16.

Anyway, I wrote the following:

PUN DAY
During my travels, like many who go on vacation, I like to send to close and not too close friends emails (today’s postcards) regaling them of my good fortune in traveling the world and their ill-luck at being forced, for whatever reason, to remain at home. Not too long ago, I settled for a while in Jomtien Beach, Thailand and began to send out an incessant stream or emails regarding my new life. During a particularly frustrating period of trying to adjust to life there, I received a few emails from some of my correspondents commenting that my recent emails dwelled too much on the difficulties of my ex-pat life and were becoming a bit of a downer.

Although I thought I was just providing a humorous take on the foibles of my current situation, I took the criticism seriously and I realize that perhaps I may have fallen into a rut. So one morning when I awoke I decided to do something different and declared that day May 8, Pun Day.

I got the idea for this, as I usually get most of my ideas, from one of my favorite authors William Kotzwinkle. As with Henry David Thoreau, he is a favorite of mine — not necessarily because of his literary output (Although he did write the screenplay for “ET the Extraterrestrial” and the stories for the “Walter the Farting Dog” series) but for the audacity of attempting a literary career with a name like Kotzwinkle.

Anyway, in his novel “The Fan Man,” about an archetypical New Yorker who, during the hot sticky days of the New York City summer, travelled about the City holding in front of him one of those little battery operated fans to cool himself off (Hence “The Fan Man” in case you have not already guessed). In one of the chapters of the book our Fan Man wakes up and declares that day to be “Dorky Day” in which he would only speak the word Dorky throughout the day [By the way for those with interest is such things Dork is a common and respected name for boys in Armenia]. The remainder of the chapter, for about 10 to 12 pages, consists exclusively of the word Dorky repeated endlessly (Dorky,Dorky, Dorky… for those who may need help visualizing) broken only by the variously perplexed or angry responses of the other citizens of the City whose paths may have crossed that of our hero on that day.

Shakespeare must have eaten his heart out. Can you imagine what the world of the theater would have been had Hamlet instead of “The play’s the thing, in which we’ll catch the conscience of the King,” announced, “today is Dorky Day?”

Anyway, Pun Day comes also from one of my other literary mentors, Cuzin Irwin (to whom I beg forgiveness) who sent me the following:

it’s Snow White’s birthday.
The dwarves buy her a camera as a present.
She is ecstatic and takes pictures of everything she sees.

She takes the film in to be developed.
She goes back the next day to pick the pictures up.
The man behind the counter shakes his head as if to say, “No”.

And for all you Snow Whites out there, may you prints come soon, but please always use protection or you may end up with a Kotzwinkle.

Have Pun.

Ciao…
Alas, with the coming of the smartphone, poor Snow White’s prints never did arrive. So, she went home with an Android.

DAILY FACTOIDS:

A. The politics of race and age:

The Tea Party is overwhelmingly white (89 percent, in fact). 75 percent of Tea Partiers are 45 years old or older, moreover, roughly 60 percent are men. It is a movement of and for old white men.

B. Blame the immigrant is as old as America:

“The first known outbreak of yellow fever had occurred in 1703, before its malignancy even had a name. It was simply called “the great sickness.” The blame that first summer fell on a ship from St. Thomas that arrived in Manhattan peculiarly close to the beginning of the outbreak. Ever since, suspicion attached itself to these “vessels from one of the sickly ports of the West Indies.”Collins, Paul. Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery. Crown/Archetype.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. A Story about the First Moon Landing:

“On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo II astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals.

One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favor.

‘What do you want?’ they asked?

‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’

‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts?

The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorized it correctly.

‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts?

‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’

When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorized, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorized so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 287). HarperCollins.

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

1. I think it was Darwin who pointed out that one’s chances of surviving to breed are greatly diminished by disparaging the size of someone’s junk when that other person is carrying a machete.2. Alas, the purpose of electoral politics in a democracy, such as ours, often seems to be to instill fear into the ignorant, ill-informed, naive and hopeless and to persuade them that they can become part of a great movement to find and eradicate whatever causes that fear.

It also seems that whenever the politics of fear overflows, it would be an appropriate remedy to choose as a leader of government someone chary of simple solutions with unknown consequences and repulsed by the cascading wall of emotions directed at punishing those whom the fearful have been led to believe are responsible for their problems.

C. Today’s Poem:

Jumping Off a Rock — “Haiku”

I jump off a rock.
The wind rushes by my face.
A splash of water.By HRM

D. Today’s Psychobabble:

The four stages of competence:

1. Unconscious incompetence:

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

2. Conscious incompetence:

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

3. Conscious competence:

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.

4. Unconscious competence:

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

I have always preferred to settle my life into Unconscious Incompetence and leave consciousness to those believing there is a benefit in competence.

“Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin.”Harari, Yuval Noah.Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 390). HarperCollins.

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN EL DORADO HILLS:
Complaining about the weather in California is like someone who makes $250,000 a year telling you how hard it is to make ends meet. I understand what they mean but have a hard time sympathizing.

For about a ten days or so here in the Golden Hills of El Dorado the skies have been mostly overcast with a light rain now and then punctuated by the light show that accompanies wonderfully loud thunderstorms. Because I still fear the thunder, I pull the sheets up about my ears.

One day, the internet router stopped working leaving me unable to access Facebook, HRM could not get into YouTube and Dick well… whatever. We desperately searched for the cause — unsuccessfully. It reminded me of many years ago running around the house with the Rabbit Ears, trying to clear the dreaded snow from the television screen so that I could watch Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Anyway, I ended up calling India or someplace like that where someone who I could barely understand re-booted the router and tried to sell me an application that he promised would allow me to fix it on my own in the future.

My plans for the summer continue to be unresolved. So far all that is settled is that I will leave on June 4 for Mendocino, then depart for Milan on the June 9. After that who knows. Sometime at the end of June or even early July, I will travel to Thailand and stay there for one or two months.

Jason and I are looking to buy a home in the Sabina area of Italy. This is the one we seem to have settled on. It has two bedrooms and comes with 57 producing commercial olive trees

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

I have been reconsidering the presidential primary elections now that the number of candidates has been reduced to two and one-half. I used to think this year’s primary process was absurd and have written some snarky pieces about them here and elsewhere. The ridiculous behavior of many of the candidates and the vicious conduct of many of their supporters have turned the process of electing a President into an embarrassment for the electorate as the candidates and their groupies descend from schoolboy taunts to vicious and misleading attacks. Nevertheless, I suspect, something has emerged that transcends the words and policies of the candidates. Something that may be more revolutionary.

With Trump, what separated him from his primary opponents seems to be his appeal to the white male working class, frustrated at the bleakness of their lives. He promises them, at least, the comfort of symbols — pride, flag, country and a God of sorts. On the other side, Sanders has also attracted in great numbers the young white males, in his case from the intellectual elite and middle classes. White males, no longer the dominant voting block, have become a swing group. Still powerful because their interests or fantasies are reflected in the bias of the media to a far greater extent than the interests or fantasies of any other segment of the electorate — women, the young, the old, other defined minorities and so on.

In the middle, Clinton seems the favorite of women and most of those groups deemed non-white. All three candidates have focused their policies and appeals primarily on those groups who see in them the solution to their concerns about our society and their role in it. In other words, on one side there are the concerns and interests of women and the non-white minorities and on the other the white males divided into two groups by ideology and social standing.

The hatred of white males toward Clinton is unprecedented. Those supporting Trump and Sanders seem to be saying that somewhere there may a woman who could be acceptable to us but just not this one, even if most women disagree.

This Presidential election seems to be more or less a replay of the last two, except where the liberal white males joined in with minority voters and women to enable a black man to win they now are adrift and threaten not to vote if their choice is not nominated. Since American elections are decided not by who votes but who does not vote, these voters threaten to sit the election out to throw away their votes thereby effectively joining forces with those white males energized to vote for the candidate of the party they usually oppose.

Trump has no real policies to better the lives of his supporters. He does, however, assure them a balm to their fears and a slice of pride. Bernie, on the other hand, promises an updated traditional New Deal type Democratic solution to certain long-simmering economic problems. He is not particularly focused on the social issues faced by minorities and women.

Clinton, unlike the other two candidates who concentrate on a few hot-button issues that appeal to their primarily white male supporters, understands the job of a President encompasses much more than a simplistic appeal to the concerns of their primary support groups (e.g., Targeting Immigrants and Muslims or wall street and the rich). Nevertheless, she has her own support groups, women, non-white minorities and children on whom she focusses her attention. And that is her revolution.

It is not whether she is acceptable to white males (or males in general) because she speaks out on issues they believe important (like for example, Warren does about Wall Street or say Bachman on immigrants) that matters, but her concentration on female empowerment, something most men either fear or do not understand. It is not enough, for example, to restore Glass-Steagall to law and leave the male hierarchy intact in order to ameliorate the discomfort both the Trump and Sanders supporters have with Wall Street’s domination of the economy and the political process. Her revolution is her determination that the board rooms should also be dominated by women and minorities (preferably female minorities) and the hedge funds be run by women managers. Take a look at her proposal for the Federal Reserve. It calls not simply for the removal of the bankers on the boards, a proposal on which both she and Bernie agree, but their replacement by women and minorities so that the board looks and acts more like America. This is the revolution.

These have always been a central theme of Clinton’s policies ever since she first stepped into the public arena. If she is successful, it promises to become the major and most lasting revolution of the millennium.

MOPEY JOE’S MEMORIES:

While trolling through back issues of T&T, I came across a report of the following conversation I had with HRM in 2012 as we were driving back from the Bay Area after some medical tests:

“During the drive, I explained to Hayden that he had to make sure I did not fall asleep due to any residual effects of the anesthesia. So we played ‘What am I thinking.’ A game I learned from the Dalls as something they used on long drives to divert their children. At one point, during a lull in the game I mentioned to H. that talking was a good thing to do to keep me awake.

He said:

‘In that case, there is something you should know about me. I am really an alien from Cluton sent here by my parents. That is why I act like I do. I have three hearts and five stomachs one of which is dedicated exclusively to digesting fish smoothies. I also have three butts one of which I lost during the Butt Wars which we lost and is why my parents sent me here to earth. I am filled with ‘joy bubbles’ which allow me to float in air or water if I want. You should also know that music makes me crazy.’

With that, he turned on the radio to a music station and acted…well crazy until finally and thankfully he shut the radio off.

Who knew?

A few days later I learned about a television show, Marvin Marvin, about a boy also from Cluton who lives with an American family. Hayden tells me Marvin is his best friend and they arrived from Cluton together.
Hayden made me promise I would tell no one of his confession because if they learned he was an alien they would send him back to Cluton. I figured that the well-known discretion exhibited by readers of ‘This and that…’ would permit them to fall within the class of no one.”

DAILY FACTOID:

“Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography, and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.”Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 350). HarperCollins.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Simple Psychology: Dunning—Kruger Effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer an illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

In my experience, the D—K effect among highly skilled individuals is their mistaken assessment of their ability to explain what they do to themselves as well as to the so-called relatively unskilled.

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

For at least 10,000 years or so virtually every political system, economic system and religion has been designed by men for men. There is no natural or divine law that requires any of these structures to be designed in the way that they have been. During those same 10,000 years, every justification of those structures has been developed by men to benefit men.

C. Today’s Poem:Sculpture of the poet Taliesin on permanent loan to the Order of Sancta Sophia, Pennal.

“I have been many things,
Before becoming as I am.
I have been a narrow multi-colored sword.
I have been a tear in the air.
I have lived as the faintest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
A book among words.”*Taliesin, 500 ACE
(*My revisions to translation).

The Birth of Taliesin:Ceridwen and Gwion Bach by Tim Rossiter.

“The magical story of Taliesin (t-ah l-ee eh-sin) – Hanes Taliesin – begins with the goddess Ceridwen (KEH-rihd-wehn) stirring her Cauldron over her cooking fire. Ceridwen is the triple-goddess in her form as elder or ‘crone’. Her Cauldron is the source of everything, for she is God in the aspect of Creator. At this point, the Cauldron is the source of poetic inspiration (awen in Welsh) and of all wisdom and knowledge. She has her son Gwion Bach (which might be translated “Little Man-ling”) stir and watch the pot. Accidentally, three drops fall from the Cauldron onto Gwion’s thumb, and he sucks his thumb. With this act he becomes filled with all knowledge – and, seeing danger ahead for himself, scurries.

There follows a magic hunt, in which Ceridwen chases Gwion, Gwion shape-shifts into a hare, then an otter, then a bird, and Ceridwen shape-shifts in pursuit. Gwion then becomes an ear of grain and Ceridwen turns herself into a hen and eats him. The symbolic meaning is fairly transparent: Gwion, the archetypal Human Person, acquiring a little wisdom, flees from fire (the cauldron) via earth (hare), water (otter) and air (bird), all of them changing forms within the great cosmic delusion of Creation (hence, “shape shifting”); but the Divine Mother is in constant pursuit, ever coaxing Her child back to Herself. Eventually, the Human becomes totally humble, submitting himself to a state of being (one grain) in which he can be wholly absorbed into the Divine Consciousness…….

…..and, as often happens in a story when grain is a symbol, he is reborn. The Hanes Taliesin tells us that Gwion now spends nine months in the womb of Ceridwen and is then reborn as Taliesin. Ceridwen wills neither to keep him nor to kill him, so she leaves him in a basket by Gwyddno’s royal salmon weir. There he is found by Prince Elffin, son of King Gwyddno Garanhir of Ceredigion.

Elffin is frustrated. He was there, allowed to fish for salmon for the first time in his life, and instead of catching any he caught this darned baby. The baby Taliesin immediately sings Elffin a poem, in which he proclaims himself “loquacious though not yet able to speak” (reminiscent of Krishna’s comparably surprising day-of-birth speech to his father), informs him “I was once little Gwion Bach but now I am Taliesin”, and promises the young prince that he will one day be worth more to him than even as inconceivably big a day’s catch as three hundred salmon.”https://kingarthursomerset.wordpress.com/about/

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.… It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem (p. 28). Tom Doherty Associates.

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water.”Harari, Yuval Noah.Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 101). HarperCollins.

Today, May 4, is Star Wars’ Day (see below).

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

A. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN EL DORADO HILLS:

It is April 15 and little has happened of note other than the passage of time. The sun seems to have made it beyond the spring clouds; morning follows night; things measured only by emotions; sleep disturbed by dreams. The great Elizabethan theatrical producer and sometime writer wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest Act 4, scene 1) It is beyond rounded, more like impregnated the way ricotta impregnates cannoli filling. We sleep at night and often move through the day like we are still asleep, the mind wandering on its merry way as it does at night with little connection to the world around us. We live our stories, those narratives we tell ourselves until we pass beyond our service area.

It has been a week since I wrote the above. Things have happened but I have forgotten them. Perhaps, I wrote some down here but for some reason, they got erased. Anyway, it is raining today and I decided to skip exercise at the health club and stay indoors lying in bed snacking on grapes and Hostess Chocolate Cup Cakes while I type this.

One day, I went for a walk on the “New York Trail” near my house. Along the trail, there are signs warning of mountain lions. There is one area that the trail passes through that I especially fear that mountain lions are hidden in the bushes. Below is a photograph of that stretch of trail. I usually turn back when I reach here. I did so again that day.

Later in the week, Lena arrived in Sacramento. I met her there and took her to tour the State Capitol which she had never seen. She was thrilled with the restoration of the building and took many photographs. Then I accompanied her on a walk through Capitol Park beneath my beloved trees. She was less thrilled. We then went to the Crocker Museum where an exhibit of Andy Warhol’s portraits was on display. I preferred the nineteenth-century landscapes that make up most of the museum’s permanent collection.
So, for about a week now I have suffered with a slight, but still miserable, cold. Last night was the worst — waking up coughing, raw throat, burning eyes sleeping fitfully with disturbing dreams. Finally toward morning following a rather disturbing event that I will not go into, I found myself traveling in the desert.

I was riding a bicycle pulling a small wagon loaded with camping equipment and a bottle of vodka. The desert landscape resembled the Burning Man in its early days, little encampments of shaggy people constructing oddly shaped dreams from refuse. I came across one that appeared to be a twisted derrick with a pod of some sort attached to it. As I approached, a bearded figure sitting in the crane shouted, “We are going to the moon.” And with that, the pod detached and shot up into the sky. I could see it contained a person since it had metal limbs extending from the pod. It was very exciting.

The pod, so high it was barely visible, circled the desert. Suddenly, it plummeted to earth, plunging behind a small building. The ugly loud crash startled a nearby flock of crows cawing into the air. I felt terrible.

The crows circled the small building for a while then returned to their roosts. From behind the building, a small woman, not elfin and slender, but broad-faced and broad-bodied came running trailing pieces of the pod behind her. She passed me with a big smile on her face shouting, “I made it! I made it!” With that, I decided it was a good point to wake up and start the day. And so I did.

While swimming one day, I noticed in the sky a wispy cloud that looked like the ghost horse (Pooka) all skeletal tattered and menacing. It disturbed me. Not because I am superstitious but because it forced me to stop and persuade myself that I wasn’t.
Today while driving HRM to school he told me that it was Star Wars Day. “May the Fourth be with You.”

B. BOOK REPORT:

British Warriors

I have just finished reading the last novel in Bernard Cornwall’s trilogy about King Arthur. Previously, I read the first nine novels of his series set in the time of King Alfred of England and his immediate descendants. While both series can be classed as historical novels, they each concern the life of a made up hero who has an out of proportion impact on the affairs of the kings and times they tell about.

We know that at the end of the Fifth and the beginning or the Sixth Centuries a warlord with the name of Arthur lived. We also know that during that time the Saxon invasion of England was temporarily halted and about a generation of relative peace followed. All the rest is legend and surmise.Arthur

Britain had a population of about 4 million throughout the Roman ascendancy. It collapsed to about 2 million within a few decades following the Roman legions departure. Many people left Britain along with the military. Some were Roman elite who returned with the armies to the remnant of the empire. Many others, the Celtic aristocracy primarily, emigrated to Brittany and Galicia in Spain. Most of the others died of disease, hunger and slaughter as civic order collapsed.

The Saxon migrations into the rapidly depopulating England, during the two hundred or so years it lasted, totaled only about 30 to 50 thousand people. The warbands on both sides rarely were larger than 100 or so armed men, not much bigger than a modern biker gang. They terrorized the small hamlets (about 50 families each) that made up most of the villages in the depopulated country. They killed the men raped the women and stole whatever goods the people may have had, until they realized that they could increase their profits by offering the villagers, for a price, protection from other biker gangs and, more likely, protection from themselves. With the extra money, they paid those who were better at playing the harp than fighting to make up songs about how great they were.Pasted Graphic 2.tiffBritish habitations following departure of Romans
Into this chaos rode Arthur and his 20 or so henchmen riding large war horses (Dark Ages Harleys) and engaged the Saxon gangs in a series of lightning raids into their turf. The horses were probably descendants of the mounts of the Samaritan cataphracts (Heavily armed mounted troops from Samaria) that the Romans imported to Britain to pacify the country.
I find it interesting that following the conquest of Britain by the Romans, they brought in an alien ruling elite and superior social organization but left the indigenous population subservient but intact. Relative peace and prosperity reigned over the island for four hundred years. Following the departure of the Romans, the native Britons fought amongst themselves until the Saxons arrived with their war of extinction. About 100 years following the peace Arthur secured after his victory at Mount Badon, the Saxons succeeded in driving the Britons into the mountains of Cornwall and Wales. Then, for about two hundred years, the Saxons fought amongst themselves until they also were faced with a war of extinction from Danish invaders. Alfred halted the invasion and his decedents pushed them back until about 100 years later the Normans conquered them all, Saxons, Danes and ultimately Britons, bringing in a ruling class that provided superior social organization and relative peace for the subservient indigenous population for the next 400 years or so — by then almost everyone thought they were English.

Anyway, all the novels were good old swords and a little sorcery along with a lot of grunting and killing in battles and more killing and raping after the battles ended and a lot of drinking of mead and ale and more killing and raping and a lot of oaths pledged and broken and Kings and Queens and starving and diseased peasants and so on.

Pookie says, “Check it out.”

PETRILLO’S MUSINGS:

Adam Smith’s stated that “The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.”

I would assume from that that the good A. Smith may have agreed that if the profits of production go into building up wealth and not reinvested in increasing production, it is not Capitalism or a capitalist system but rather something else — perhaps something more like the royal system he lived in where the profits of production went to increasing the wealth of the entitled classes or into rent based assets.

Similarly, the debt and credit system are not Capitalism. They existed long before Capitalism developed. They proved exceptionally helpful and often assisted in increasing production but the bankers need for timely repayment is not the same as the investors wish for profit and may at times suppress production in order to satisfy the need for repayment. Also, as we have seen in the past 50 years or so, the bank based financial system encouraged the replacement of production with production-less wealth creation, thus requiring government to periodically step in to boost confidence by transferring public wealth in order to prop up the banks thereby making non-production based assets even more valuable. In effect, companies producing goods can fail but banks producing paper wealth cannot. I always felt that the banking system, since it often in the long run substitutes debt and credit for investment, risk and the reinvestment of the profits into increasing production is the anthesis of Capitalism.

Corporations are not Capitalism. They are a state sponsored scheme to encourage investment in production that investors would otherwise consider too risky. True, like debt and credit they may be helpful and perhaps essential in increasing production but they also have downsides. Investors having significantly limited liabilities as well as microscopic ownership interests leave operational oversight, to management, a few large investors, and various investor agents all of whom may have and often do have interests other than increasing production. They also, in the long run, substitute organizational preservation to production. Reinvestment of the profits of production in increasing production becomes a far lower priority to keeping Wall Street happy.

DAILY FACTOID:

‘Kushim!’ is the first recorded name in History. He was an accountant in Mesopotamia somewhere about 5000 or more years ago. It is interesting and telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror. The second name we know from about the same time in Gal-Sal. He was a slave owner and the next two names we know about were his slaves En-pap X and Sukkalgir. So the first people whose names we know of were an accountant, a slave owner, and two slaves — no heroes and no Kings. The first King’s name showed up a couple of generations later.

What this shows is that little has changed in 5000 years. The world is still run by accountants, business owners (slave owners) and workers (slaves), Kings, Heroes, and Prophets are just entertainment.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Religious Thoughts:

No one knows if God exists.
No one knows if He does not exist.

In the beginning ,there was the Singularity. The Singularity became the Universe.
The Universe generated life.
Life evolved in complexity and awareness until it delivered a symbol using, self-aware entity we call Humanity.
Humanity then ordered its perception of everything into the known, the Empirical and into the unknown, the Belief and the ethical, the Moral.
The empirical system most complex, organized and integrated we call “Science”.
The belief system most comprehensive we call “Religion”.
The unknown is infinite.
The known is ever expanding and evolving.
Science and Religion are one and cannot conflict.
The unknown remains infinite as Science expands.
When Science discerned the earth was not the center of the universe religion continued unlimited.
Whoever claims that the fruits of Science are wrong because they conflict with Religion are wrong.
All things change and evolve, the form evolves, the science evolves, the religion evolves. Even God evolves.
Humanity enunciated (developed) the prime Moral rule, “Do good and avoid evil”. All religious sects agree.
Humanity put forth the means to carry out the prime rule, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you,” Most religious sects have enunciated this rule in one form or another.
It means the individual measures the rule.

B. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

“Humans and domesticated animals are two of nature’s evolutionary success stories. Unfortunately for domesticated animals, there is only too often a vast discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering.”

C. Today’s Poem:

A young man’s plea for the return of his wife

“Of marriage? Judge, I want to say,
It’s deep and homeward, safe and soft,
As evening birds make to their loft,
Or horses to their beds of hay.”

“Of women I knew nothing deep;
I lived alone and worked my fields,
And fed my cattle, milked their yields,
And nightly, wearied, laid to sleep.

But I believed that man needs more,
And so I set myself to learn
Of marriage, everywhere I turned,
By watching couples evermore.

I saw young men with beardless cheeks
Dancing with their shining brides.
I saw old gray-haired men besides
Look fond as though they’d wed but weeks.

And then I thought and thought so much
Of what Life needs to make it pure,
I understood man must be sure,
Yet tender with his loving touch,

And never coarse and never mere,
Watchful that he do his duty,
Husband, lover, to his beauty,
Trusted guardian of his dear.

I thought and thought of how I might,
Love a woman who would give,
Her hand to me and come and live
Beneath my roof from morn till night.

I found a woman, sweet and pretty,
Good of nature, clear of eye,
Kind in spirit, soft of sigh,
Who didn’t need me to be witty,

Who knew that I could love with force,
Who judged my feelings were sincere,
Who sensed that I would hold her dear,
Who saw I was an untapped source

Of kindness, warmth and deep affection,
Care and conscientious thought,
Who believed a true man ought
Give his wife his best protection.

She married me, I married her,
A day of days, the sun shone brighter,
Our hearts, we found, were never lighter,
And then I knew it—love’s the spur.”

“For the short time we were married,
I did my best to love this girl,
I never grizzled like a churl,
And always made sure that I carried

Heavy weights, like sacks or logs
Or furniture from room to room,
I combed the horses with the groom,
And fed the cats, the birds, the dogs.

The other matters that I tended,
Sweeter things that women need,
A lovely flower, a glass of mead,
A smile to praise a garment mended.

I ate her food with hearty joy,
I chose for her the finest leather,
For boots to brave inclement weather,
Loved her hearty or when coy.

If I came into the house,
And she stood there, unawares,
I chased her laughing up the stairs
And kissed her neck, soft as a mouse.

Every night I held her close,
Stroked her softly, caresses deep,
Smoothed her forehead, and in sleep,
Held her safely till she rose.

As I speak these words this morning,
It must sound as though I brag,
But my motive is to drag
My hurt heart out of its mourning.”

“The truth is, judge, I lost my lady
Not to any man who’s moral.
Pretty soon he’ll pick a quarrel,
And he’ll dump her somewhere shady.

But if she’ll come and take my arm,
I’ll so love her, so regard her,
Do my best to work much harder,
Even try and learn some charm.

I may be dull and somewhat boring,
But I love her perfect skin,
And the way she tilts her chin,
And her little whispered snoring.

I love the way her tiny hand,
Can crack a nut, or milk a cow,
I love above all that she knows how
To draw pictures in the sand

Of faces, insects, beasts, and birds,
And writes rhymes that never scan.
She whistles better than a man;
I love her sense of the absurd.

We dwelt quietly on a hill…
I’m an ordinary man…
Her body’s soft, much softer than
A fledgling’s—God, I love her still.”

Delaney, Frank. Ireland: A Novel (p. 203). HarperCollins.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 87).

TODAY FROM AMERICA:

POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN El DORADO HILLS:

So, I returned to Kirkwood with my grandson Anthony who was to give a skiing lesson to a truly remarkable three-year-old. I also met their equally remarkable parents, a Thai couple who fled Thailand to avoid an arranged marriage and spent weeks homeless in Detroit. He eventually got his engineering Master’s Degree and she completed her education also. At some point, they moved to California where she works at Stanford Hospital in the Neurology Department and he quit his job to become a full-time house-husband.
We spent the evening in a comfortable cabin with a great view.

Since then it has been back to the same old grind, in between driving HRM to and from school, I swim, nap, eat and read. Sometimes I drive HRM to his Flag Football games and to his Basketball training.

One day, with little else to do, we visited The Serpentarium to search out a replacement for Puff the Bearded Dragon.

Not at night, however, is my existence so peaceful. My dreams are not nightmares since there is no fire breathing mare bearing down on me, no fear of injury or death, just hopelessness and a suffocating frustration. I drift, not knowing if I am awake or not until I hear my heartbeat and feel the room around me.

A few posts ago, I wrote a poem, The Night of the Succubus. While I drift in my half-wakened state, I feel as though I had just encountered it in those dreams leaving me exhausted and disturbed. Often I cannot get back to sleep for hours. Strangely, unlike my usual dreams they disappear from my memory almost instantly when I wake up — gone without leaving a story behind, only dread.

A few days ago, I realized that a memory I had cherished was fake. Many years ago I lived in Little Italy in New York City, on the top of a seven-story walk up while attending Law School. After I passed the bar and began to try cases, whenever I would win at trial (and I always did) in the nearby law courts, I would walk to Vincent’s for a dish of Calamari covered their hottest hot sauce (it was almost purple) and begin my drinking for the night. Little Italy, where I also remember nights walking down the steps to the mob run Blue Grotto for Lobster Fra Diavola and fried mozzarella.

I also carried other memories of Little Italy — its tiny restaurants in a covered bazaar with Chinese produce markets next door — travels with my grandfather to meet relatives on a side street, Mafiosi all, silent unsmiling men and stern-faced women. These last two memories I realized were only dreams I thought were real. Dreams I had carried throughout my adult life as real to me as anything I had experienced. Gone now.

Will my memories, one by one, prove to be fakes and disappear until none remain when I die? Perhaps it’s that I have been dreaming about these past few days.

PETRILLO’S COMMENTARY:

We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto — Update.

About 4 years ago, I wrote a series of humorous and not so humorous posts about us, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, that we, in a fit or pathological grandiosity named ourselves and that can be translated as Wise Wise Men, Very Smart Guys, Wise wise Guys, Smarty Smarty Pants, Smart Asses and so on. We needed to repeat Sapiens twice because we discovered guys, way back when, who looked pretty much exactly like us but seemed to be not so smart so we added another Smart to make sure no one confused us with them. And, before I forget, we called ourselves Homo, Man, and not human or men and women, or us even, because in the beginning, most of this stuff was written by men who liked to use a dead language to show that they were very smart and you weren’t and that women were not men and not worth a fig.

The previous posts were prompted by some new scientific discoveries about these wise guys and girls that had blown the minds of the Latin-spouting smarty, smarty pants (Homo Sap. Saps.) The first discovery was that although there were a number of what the Latin-spouting smarty pants named Homo something or other living at the time Smarty, smarty pants dropped by, such as, Homo floresiensis [Flower man from Borneo or someplace like that. Only three feet tall and perhaps an early Leprechaun or Hobbit]; Homo Erectus [Erect man — don’t think to hard about this]; Homo tsaichangensis [The guys from Taiwan]; Homo neanderthalensis [The big German guys]; Homo rhodesiensis [Our man in Rhodesia or Zimbabwe]; Homo sapiens idaltu [Fairly smart folks from Ethiopia {Tall too}]; Archaic Homo sapiens [Cro-Magnon or not so wise old people] and Red Deer Cave people [your guess is as good as mine], there lived someone in a cave in a God forsaken part of Russia, without a Latin name. Well, this shook everyone up who was into this sort of thing. After all, who knows how many people were out there at that time without Latin names. Anyway, they gave her and her people the temporary name Denisovans after the God-forsaken cave they found her in entertaining some big Germans and Wise Wise Men and who knows what else.Pasted

Oh, and by the way she was obviously a her and that’s really when the bones began to hit the fan.

Deni Denisova herself.

You see, at about the same time, DNA sequencing (similar to NSA spying but smaller) became all the rage and someone decided to do a DNA sequencing on Deni’s (my name for her) knucklebone and tooth, about all of her they found, to see if they could discover something and become famous on social media. And oh did they find something!Deni’s Tooth — One can tell by the state of her tooth Deni chose another profession over becoming a dental hygienist.

First, we have to understand that perhaps three or four hundred years ago some guy living in Europe decided it would be good and perhaps even biblical to give all living things Latin names. And it would be even better to divide them between those that looked a lot alike but each thought the other was so ugly they did not want to breed unless it was closing time and they were both blind drunk and if they did, their children, if there even were some, would be so screwed up they would avoid bars altogether. These they called species another Latin word meaning species. For example, in the Genus (see below) that includes Horses, Donkeys, and Zebras, we know that horses find donkeys as ugly and sin and vice versa, but should they be forced into it would produce an unwanted bundle of joy that would be a mule and have no Latin name and no prospects.

The other word was genus which meant all the species that looked more alike than they looked like others. Then they gathered all these genuses into something called Families for some reason and Families into other Latin names and so on. But, we do not have to concern ourselves with that now.

So, what was the surprise? Well, even though my old college professor Carroll Quigley said it was not so, most of the Latin namers believed the various Homo’s ( By the way, having realized that more than half of the members of the species were not men which is what the Latin word homo means they tried very hard to make amends by insisting Homo really meant “human or something else or changing it to something like hominoid (mannoid) all of which remains, at best, problematical solutions to repairing bruised egos.) Anyway, they believed these species thought each other unredeemablely ugly and so avoided having children with them or at best played lonely shepherd in the night.

Well, low and behold, what they discovered was that Deni was keeping a cave for more than just getting in out of the cold. Not only was Deni offering her services to those hunky but low brow Germans, but us, or at least our long dead grandparents as well. Later, we discovered our long ago grandmothers and grandfathers were doing it with the Hunky Germans and God knows who else also. It seems that about 60,000 years ago those caves were the hookup bars of the Stone Age.

It was bad enough to find out that our ancient grandparents did not honor family values but that the parts of our genes our brawny cousins gave us were often the best, like our immunological resistance. Since it was not too long after this that our cousins disappeared, it perhaps could be argued that the portions of DNA we gave them was similar in effect to the small-pox the Europeans gifted the Native Americans with.

Since then there have been additional developments, perhaps not so momentous, but those will have to wait for my next post.

DAILY FACTOID:

Some have asked where the name Pookie came from. I have explained that when HRM was a little over one-year-old, I used to call him ‘pookie’ whenever I came home from work. He, thinking I was saying my name, began calling me Pookie. So the name stuck to me and not to him.

But that begs the question — What is a Pookie? Well perhaps it comes from the old Irish word Pooka (or Phouka or Puca)

THE POOKA (PHOUKA, PUCA)Pooka

No fairy is more feared in Ireland than the pooka. This may be because it is always out and about after nightfall, creating harm and mischief, and because it can assume a variety of terrifying forms.

The guise in which it most often appears, however, is that of a sleek, dark horse with sulfurous yellow eyes and a long wild mane. In this form, it roams large areas of the countryside at night, tearing down fences and gates, scattering livestock in terror, trampling crops and generally doing damage around remote farms.

In remote areas of County Down, the pooka becomes a small, deformed goblin who demands a share of the crop at the end of the harvest: for this reason several strands, known as the ‘pooka’s share’, are left behind by the reapers.

In parts of County Laois, the pooka becomes a huge, hairy bogeyman who terrifies those abroad at night; In Waterford and Wexford, it appears as an eagle with a massive wingspan; In Roscommon, it appears as a black goat with curling horns.

The mere sight of the Pooka may prevent hens laying their eggs or cows giving milk, and it is the curse of all late night travelers as it is known to swoop them up onto its back and then throw them into muddy ditches or bog-holes. The pooka has the power of human speech, and it has been known to stop in front of certain houses and call out the names of those it wants to take upon its midnight dashes. If that person refuses, the pooka will vandalize their property because it is a very vindictive fairy.

The origins of the pooka are to some extent speculative. The name may come from the Scandinavian pook or puke, meaning ‘nature spirit’. Such beings were very capricious and had to be continually placated or they would create havoc in the countryside, destroying crops and causing illness among livestock. Alternatively, the horse cults prevalent throughout the early Celtic world may have provided the underlying motif for the nightmare steed.

PEPE’S POTPOURRI:

A. Trenz Pruca’s Observations:

Two great lies.

“If you work harder you will have a better life” — For some perhaps but probably not you. For society as a whole, however, every time we passed the threshold where working longer and harder were required, such as during the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, the health, happiness and yes even wealth of the mass of people declined. Those who worked less, royalty, administrators, merchants and military fared much better. But, some would point out, there were far more of us. A questionable benefit if there ever was one.

“If we work harder our children will have a better life.” Again yes for some, but historically for most, the benefits were short-lived and eventually most of the children lived worse lives.

So what does this mean? Work less, spend more time with your families and friends, live frugally replacing things with experiences, have fewer children with more adults caring for and loving them.

B. Today’s Poem:

I Am Not Old

I am not old…she said
I am rare.
I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.
I am the retrospective
Of my life as art
I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense
I am the fullness
Of existing.
You think I am waiting to die…
But I am waiting to be found
I am a treasure.
I am a map.
And these wrinkles are
Imprints of my journey
Ask me anything.~ Samantha Reynolds ~

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 32). HarperCollins.

TODAY’S PHOTOGRAPH:

The Death of Cleopatra, painted by somebody with an overwrought imagination.